Sealing Off a Last Stand : 80 Volunteers Keep an Eye on Colony and Intruders

With the instincts of a mother protecting her young, Alberta Brown senses approaching danger. She trains her binoculars far down the beach, where four teenage boys amble along, skipping stones.

“They better not come down here,” Brown said, peering through her field glasses from a bluff overlooking a colony of 300 seals with two dozen nursing pups.

The boys soon turn back. A human confrontation is avoided, a seal stampede averted.

From sunup to sundown, volunteers stand like sentries over one of the few harbor seal rookeries that remain on the Southern California coastline.

Hordes of beachcombers and sunbathers have driven the seals from most of their favorite spots to come ashore.

Ever nervous of their vulnerability on land, seals will bolt for the water at the first sign of a dog or a human being.

Yet a dedicated band of seal watchers is trying to preserve a rocky stretch of coastline near the Ventura-Santa Barbara county line as a seasonal sanctuary for the federally protected California harbor seal.

They persuaded the city of Carpinteria to close the beach from Dec. 1 through May 31, the seals’ pupping season.

They coaxed Chevron, the land’s owner, into posting signs and giving them access to the bluffs high above the colony so they can keep watch.

And for the past six whelping seasons, volunteers have taken turns hot-footing it to the beach to shoo away anyone who walks past the “beach closed” signs.

Toe to toe in the sand, they beseech, they lecture and sometimes even berate persistent beach walkers in a never-ending--and some believe futile--campaign to persuade the public that seals, too, deserve a place in the sun.

“This place is threatened by encroaching civilization,” said Peter C. Howorth, director of the Marine Mammal Center of Santa Barbara.

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On a recent sunny day, Howorth turned back 33 people who stopped to read the sign and then ignored its warnings and continued to walk toward the rookery. “More and more people want to go see nature,” he said, “but more and more of them believe that the rules don’t apply to them.”

Most people, to be sure, are courteous and stay their distance.

A steady stream of tourists and other visitors peer down from the towering bluffs at the seals sunbathing below.

The herd, with its nursing pups, has become such a popular attraction that the 80 volunteer docents spend more time controlling enthusiastic crowds on the bluffs than creating human blockades on the beach.

About 12,000 people visited last year, including busloads of schoolchildren from Los Angeles, Thousand Oaks and elsewhere.

“We have to keep the voices down and keep the arms from waving,” said Al Clark, one of the founding members of Seal Watch of Carpinteria.

A loud commotion from the cliffs, he said, could startle the colony into a terror-filled race for the sea.

The whelping season is the most critical time for the colony, seal watchers say. Newborns are delivered at 8 to 20 pounds, tiny compared to the 300-pound-plus girth of the plumpest males.

Although the pups can swim shortly after birth, their mothers often leave them on shore while they hunt for fish. All it takes is one skittish adult to spook the herd, triggering a frantic scramble of seals lunging toward the sea.

Pups can get trampled or abandoned in the confusion.

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Howorth draws the analogy of people panicking in a crowded movie theater at the sound of a fire alarm.

In this case, he said, envision that many of those jostling for the exit are pregnant women near delivery or carrying newborns.

After an initial stampede, pups will sometimes venture into the water to find their mothers.

Some are lost to the currents or high surf.

“It is the very young that are susceptible,” Clark said, before they have a chance to swell in size with a layer of blubber that insulates them from the chilly waters.

“We find them later,” he said, “washed up in Ventura County--dead.”

As a species, California harbor seals are healthy and growing nearly 4% a year, according to the California Department of Fish and Game. They are not considered a threatened or endangered species, but they are protected from hunting or harassment under the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.

Carpinteria does not have the only rookery in Southern California, but it is the last one easily accessible to the public.

The Channel Islands provide a huge nursery for harbor seals and their cousins, the elephant seals and sea lions. And there are a few other established pupping spots on the mainland in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, although they are on private land without public access or on military bases.

The Point Mugu Navy base has its own colony of harbor seals that loll around the sandbars of Mugu Lagoon with their young.

Vandenberg Air Force Base does too, but trespassers are forbidden on the beach.

Unlike these places, the Carpinteria rookery is flanked by public beaches, Rincon Beach Park and Carpinteria State Beach Park.

Low tide regularly exposes enough sand so that pedestrians can maneuver around the rocks and cliffs that otherwise shelter the cove.

Chevron has a pier and various pipelines extending out from the beach to service the numerous oil platforms that sit offshore. Supply boats continually cozy up to the pier to ferry personnel and supplies to the oil platforms.

But the seals pay no attention to this rhythmic industrial activity, seal watchers say.

Instead, it’s the errant dog or pedestrian blundering along the beach that sets them into a panic.

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Chevron has posted signs warning that the beach is off limits for 750 feet on either side of the pier. The oil giant is delighted to have volunteer seal watchers guarding the beach.

“They’ve saved us a lot of problems,” said Lee Bafalon, senior land representative in Chevron’s Ventura office. “We do everything we can to assure the seals’ safety and comfort. But it is so much better when a fellow member of the public tells someone that they shouldn’t be there, instead of a big oil company.”

So Alberta Brown stands vigil over the 100 or so seals that can be found at any one time lounging on the rocks like fat, furry slugs with cute faces and tails. From her perch on the bluff, the retired assistant high school principal can spot wayward beachcombers coming from either direction.

Like other seal watchers, she fears that a nearby planned development could wash over the line they have drawn in the sand.

Carpinteria recently agreed to allow developers to build a 100-room resort hotel and 60 houses on 83 acres next to the bluffs.

The developers want more, and have sued the city, demanding approval for a 200-room hotel and about 200 dwellings.

“Once you get hundreds of people living in this area, the disturbances will be out of control,” Brown said. “This rookery will not survive that kind of encroachment.”